The Library

‘Give me the change, please.’

“Aw, wadda yuh expeck of Chinless?” returned the brunette stenographer disdainfully as she crackled paper to conceal her breach of the office rules against conversation. “Feller with ingrown jaws was made to pick on.”

The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.

I only woke this morning - To find the world is fair - I’m going on for forty, - With scarcely one grey hair.

About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me, and sliced me on the end of the chin before I had got my mind made up.

“There is a proverb that if a peasant woman has no troubles she will buy a pig. The Luganovitchs had no troubles, so they made friends with me.”

“I’d marry the Empress of China for one bowl of chop suey. I’d commit murder for a plate of beef stew. I’d steal a wafer from a waif. I’d be a Mormon for a bowl of chowder.”

You would sooner know that you fooled your money away on a spree, and made yourself sick, than lost it out of an extra hole in your pocket, and kept well.

“And do you ever think that present-day New York will some time be as fragmentary and fabulous as Troy or Zimbabwe? That archaeologists may delve in its ruins, beneath the sevenfold increment of later cities, and find a few rusting mechanisms of disputed use, and potteries of doubtful date—”

“This room is not well adapted for a cell, and Mr. Patrick Cairns occupies too large a proportion of our carpet.”

“Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton. With a smiling face and a heart of marble he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry.”

“He should have been a buck in the days of the Regency—a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of fair ladies, and, by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again.”

“Well, they did not take much—only half-a-dozen articles of plate off the sideboard. Lady Brackenstall thinks that they were themselves so disturbed by the death of Sir Eustace that they did not ransack the house as they would otherwise have done.”

At my cry he dropped it from his grasp and turned as pale as death. I snatched it up and examined it. One of the gold corners, with three of the beryls in it, was missing.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.”

You must drop everything, Sherlock. Never mind your usual petty puzzles of the police-court. It’s a vital international problem that you have to solve. Why did Cadogan West take the papers, where are the missing ones, how did he die, how came his body where it was found, how can the evil be set right?

“The presumption is strongly against it. Bodies in the dissecting-rooms are injected with preservative fluid. These ears bear no signs of this. They are fresh, too. They have been cut off with a blunt instrument, which would hardly happen if a student had done it.”

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.”

“What one man can invent another can discover,”

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

“For three days he has been sinking, and I doubt if he will last the day. He would not let me get a doctor. This morning when I saw his bones sticking out of his face and his great bright eyes looking at me I could stand no more of it.”

It can be imagined that my close intimacy with Sherlock Holmes had interested me deeply in crime, and that after his disappearance I never failed to read with care the various problems which came before the public.

Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sittingroom in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe . . .

“There can be no question that this was snatched from the face or the person of the assassin.”

One glimmer of life came into his face for an instant, and he uttered two or three words with an eager air of warning. They were slurred and indistinct, but to my ear the last of them, which burst in a shriek from his lips, were “the Lion’s Mane.”

“No violence, gentlemen—no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture!”

“You must admit that it is curious and suggestive that this incident should occur on the eve of this important match, and should involve the only man whose presence seems essential to the success of the side. It may, of course, be coincidence, but it is interesting.”

“Ah, Watson,” said Holmes, smiling, “perhaps you would not be very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and wedding, you found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of fortune. I think that we may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully and thank our stars that we are never likely to find ourselves in the same position.”

“Important fresh evidence to hand. McFarlane’s guilt definitely established. Advise you to abandon case. — Lestrade.”

“Well, now, you do not mean to seriously suggest that this German rode off upon a bicycle in the dead of the night bearing the boy in his arms?”

“It was his particular direction that we should always, when he rang, leave his meal upon a chair, outside his door. Then he rings again when he has finished, and we take it down from the same chair. If he wants anything else he prints it on a slip of paper and leaves it.”

“He tore up one of his wife’s photographs in my presence—tore it up furiously in a tempest of passion. ‘I never wish to see her damned face again,’ he shrieked.”

“You will not see him.” “Why not?” “He was murdered in his house last night.”

“This is certainly very novel.”

“It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian. I emerged as you see me. Mr. Woodley went home in a cart.”

At first I thought that she had not recognised me, but as I bent over her she suddenly shrieked out in a voice which I shall never forget, “Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!”

Our client, Mr. Robert Ferguson, of Ferguson and Muirhead, tea brokers, of Mincing Lane, has made some inquiry from us in a communication of even date concerning vampires.

I don’t think that any of my adventures with Mr. Sherlock Holmes opened quite so abruptly, or so dramatically, as that which I associate with The Three Gables.

“He had no kith nor kin—or, if he had, I never heard of it. But he took a kind of pride in the queerness of his name. That was what brought us together.”

On the table in the window were several shreds from a pencil which had been sharpened. A broken tip of lead was lying there also. Evidently the rascal had copied the paper in a great hurry, had broken his pencil, and had been compelled to put a fresh point to it.

“Well, Mr. Holmes, you would hardly say it was a face at all. That’s how it looked. Our milkman got a glimpse of her once peeping out of the upper window, and he dropped his tin and the milk all over the front garden.”

My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world.

“Hatched, sir, when my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep. I heard a whack and felt a jar and sat up, and there was the end of the egg pecked out and a rum little brown head looking out at me.”

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain pride mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue.

“May ne’er a noble of thy murd’rous line Survive to reach a greater age than thine!”

“Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket! I’m a-comin’, I’m a-comin’, an’ I’m shorely gwine to get yer! You heah me, Mr. Pocket? I’m gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain’t cauliflowers!”

He came from ‘further out’, That land of heat and drought And dust and gravel. He got a touch of sun, And rested at the run Until his cure was done, And he could travel.

And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot remembered.

The man in the tall hat walks in the centre of the ring, holding in front of the horse’s head the end of his long whip, which he cracks deafeningly.⁠ ⁠…“Allez!⁠ ⁠…”

From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—

Ought to be under the Dog Act, he ought, and be kept off the course. Fall! why, he’d fall off a cart, let alone off a steeplechase horse.

There has been reward — but the end of all -Is dust and ashes.

But something peculiar happened to the archdeacon that morning, something that had never happened before. Perhaps it was the whiskey that his wife gave him with his tea.

The coffin became the new status symbol.

“You are thinking, of course, of dying dramatically behind a pair of blazing blasters. But you will soon learn, my boy, that a soldier’s duty is to protect the worlds he represents by whatever actions will produce the best results, no matter how unheroic those actions may be.”

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee;

Ants were once men and made their living by tilling the soil. But, not content with the results of their own work, they were always casting longing eyes upon the crops and fruits of their neighbours, ...

“It never fades. I have had it now for three months. And it is ever bright and smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it.”

At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.

“I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can think of nothing, positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you know, all his workmen call that place of his ‘Monson’s Folly’?”

I was waiting for her and we went along the thick alley, that very same alley where I saw for the first time my incomparable Kate, the queen of my heart.

“I never before saw a man that would sell his sister for a dictionary!”

No record of insanity in the family for two hundred years. All healthy, well-balanced. No reason for insanity now. Shock? Silly. No shock. I’m to be rescued in six days. No shock to that.

A certain man who had an Ass and a Mule loaded them both up one day and set out upon a journey. So long as the road was fairly level, the Ass got on very well: but by and by they came to a place among...

A figure muffled in a cloak, stepped out within reach of the light, and, pausing a moment upon the verge of the giddy descent, plunged headlong into the canal.

While the Stars in their courses. Do fight on our side?

That is why, when I have finished this letter (if I can only manage to finish it) I shall give it to a porter and tell him to post it at the very moment when the train starts. And I shall watch him from the window and feel, as if I were actually saying goodbye to you, that painful oppression of the heart.

It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.

May no night pass that you are not haunted by the thought of the man who rots in gaol because you have not done the duty which you are paid to do!

“And if you keep them carefully, Then God will you reward; But if you otherwise should deal, God will your deeds regard.”

A Bat, a Bramble, and a Seagull went into partnership and determined to go on a trading voyage together. The Bat borrowed a sum of money for his venture; the Bramble laid in a stock of clothes of vari...

In his dreams he, single-handed, held the breach against a prodigious number of the enemy. They charged upon him, but he, though bleeding from a dozen wounds, did not retreat. He held them back; with rifle, bombs, bayonet, even fists, he hurled them back until he was ringed round by piles of the slain.

Two Travellers were on the road together, when a Bear suddenly appeared on the scene. Before he observed them, one made for a tree at the side of the road, and climbed up into the branches and hid the...

These impacts were soft, and stealthy, as of the paws of some feline. Besides, when I listened carefully, I seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet.

One night, when he was dreaming of it after his habit, he dreamt he took the tissue paper from one of the buttons, and found its brightness a little faded, and that distressed him mightily in his dream.

A Queen Bee from Hymettus flew up to Olympus with some fresh honey from the hive as a present to Jupiter, who was so pleased with the gift that he promised to give her anything she liked to ask for. S...

There came a stranger to Walgett town, To Walgett town when the sun was low, And he carried a thirst that was worth a crown, Yet how to quench it he did not know.

“I wish you to come for a short journey with me, to remain always at my side, and to promise to do 25without question whatever I may ask you, however unreasonable it may appear to you to be.”

The Members of the Body once rebelled against the Belly. “You,” they said to the Belly, “live in luxury and sloth, and never do a stroke of work; while we not only have to do all the hard work there i...

Disease—a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person!

“Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?”

O, it’s die we must, but it’s live we can.

Then I shall say, someone help me to get out. I can’t do it alone because I’ve lost one of my legs. They’ll all laugh and think that I’m joking, and I shall say, all right, come and have a look, you unbelieving bastards.

“But how can any lasting contact be established between your people and mine if you resort to such barbaric attitudes? Eat me? Rather you should discuss questions with me, philosophy, the arts—”

I heard a gentle tapping, which appeared to come from the wall behind my chair. The sound was such as might have been made by a human hand, not as upon a door by one asking admittance, but rather, I thought, as an agreed signal, an assurance of someone’s presence in an adjoining room.

“We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.”

This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate.

“Go on, hopper,” Nick said, speaking out loud for the first time “Fly away somewhere.”

“Then we remembered that there wasn’t another rooster within five miles —our only neighbour, an Irishman named Page, didn’t have one at the time— and we’d often heard another cock crow, but didn’t think to take any notice of it.”

His hammering helped to deafen the sound of the birds, the shuffling, the tapping, and more ominous—he did not want his wife or the children to hear it—the splinter of cracked glass.

The Birds were at war with the Beasts, and many battles were fought with varying success on either side. The Bat did not throw in his lot definitely with either party, but when things went well for th...

His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

‘You might be old Satan’s brother by the look of you; an’ if the cap’n wants to kill a cat, let it be you.’

But the third, the prettiest and the merriest, tossed her head and said, with a twinkle in her eye, “Why so proud? As for me I would be content with the Black Bull of Norroway.”

In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.

“Listen, you poor, benighted provincial”⁠—I was trying to make him feel ashamed⁠—“here in Petersburg no one gets up before eleven. Lie down on the sofa or ask for some tea.”

“He gave me a very interesting account of an interview between his father and Queen Victoria, and mentioned casually that his father had walked across the Thames without getting wet.”

I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, so I exist in nature.

Oh! ye wild black swans, ’twere a world of wonder - For a while to join in your westward flight.

There was a desperate earnestness in this woman’s manner, that went to the young man’s heart. He was young in his profession, and had not yet witnessed enough of the miseries which are daily presented before the eyes of its members, to have grown comparatively callous to human suffering.

The most disreputable thing in Yancey Goree’s law office was Goree himself, sprawled in his creaky old arm-chair.

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Then something happened—something horrible happened that made the women faint and the strongest men who saw it grow sick and dizzy. The motorman’s lips were as gray as his face, and that was ashen gray; and he shook and staggered from the superhuman effort he had put forth to stop his car.

Well, it was his own fault. He could have accepted the new regime; some respectable people had done that. He could have fled the country; many honorable people had. A scientist should be concerned with the eternal, not with transient political phenomena; and a scientist should be able to live anywhere.

Yes, he thought, that is how most people live their actual lives—skimming it through, in a hurry to get to the end and find out who got married and who got rich.

“But what else can we do? Don’t you see we must either follow one wild possibility or else go home to bed?”

“Yes, fight! I’ll show you what kind of a man I am! I’ll show you who you want to fight! Maybe you think I can’t fight! Maybe you think I can’t! I’ll show you, you skin, you card-sharp! Yes, you cheated! You cheated! You cheated!”

“A pig is masculine as long as you call it a pig, but if you lose your temper with it and call it a ferocious beast it becomes one of us at once. French is a dreadfully unsexing language.”

The man’s name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his aging.

Young men like to feel that there is a young woman not very far away.

‘I know her, I tell you,’ he continued. ‘She was alive and hearty yesterday. It’s impossible she can be dead; it’s impossible you should have got this body fairly.’

Now one summer evening, as she was trotting, full of smiles as ever, along the high road to her hovel, what should she see but a big black pot lying in the ditch!

While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard.

“It is our cheap press. The ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the classical.”

Dreary land in rainy weather, with the endless clouds that drift — O’er the bushman like a blanket that the Lord will never lift.

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

And the king of ’em all, I reckon, the man that could stand a pinch - Was the boss of a one-horse gunboat. They called her the ’Admiral Lynch’.

He immediately ordered eight soldiers of the main guard to take their muskets and follow him. They marched across the street, forcing their way roughly through the crowd, and pricking the town’s-people with their bayonets.

Napoleon had this bottle, and by it he grew to be the king of the world; but he sold it at the last, and fell.

When I was nineteen years of age my father had the misfortune to die. He had always had perfect health, and his death, which occurred at the dinner table without a moment’s warning, surprised no one more than himself.

“My house was well stocked with provisions, and it seemed better to put up with feeding a few soldiers than to banish myself goodness knows where. But when I saw these Prussians it was too much for me!”

They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.

A Boy put his hand into a jar of Filberts, and grasped as many as his fist could possibly hold. But when he tried to pull it out again, he found he couldn’t do so, for the neck of the jar was too smal...

In the centre of this room, lying in the middle of a golden patch of sunlight, there was stretched a huge creature, as large as a tiger, but as black and sleek as ebony.

“Write ‘Votes for Women’ on the stable door, and the thing would pass for a Suffragette outrage.”

Only her memory lives to-night.

When early on some sapphire Easter morn In a high litter red as blood or sin the Pope is borne.

Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump.

On the outer Barcoo where the churches are few, And men of religion are scanty, On a road never cross’d ’cept by folk that are lost, One Michael Magee had a shanty.

I’m travellin’ down the Castlereagh, and I’m a station hand, I’m handy with the ropin’ pole, I’m handy with the brand, And I can ride a rowdy colt, or swing the axe all day, But there’s no demand for a station-hand along the Castlereagh.

“Don’t you know that if I stamped with my foot all Suleiman-bin-Daoud’s Palace and this garden here would immediately vanish in a clap of thunder.”

It is forbidden to travel east. It is forbidden to cross the river. It is forbidden to go to the Place of the Gods. All these things are forbidden.

What would you answer, not to a judge or to the authorities, or even to the emperor, but to your own conscience, should it ask you, ‘Why did you enter upon this terrible, unjust slaughter?’

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

When her task was finished she put on her robe of rushes and it hid all her fine clothes, and she put on the cap and it hid all her beautiful hair, so that she looked quite a common country girl.

For fifteen years I have lived a decent, honest life. Pray God for your own sinful soul, that the devil in me does not wake again.

“You know she will give you anything. You have only been married a few months. If you ask and give a plausible reason you can get all we want and more.”

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

But he had promised Lady Sannox to see her that evening and it was already half-past eight. His hand was outstretched to the bell to order the carriage when he heard the dull thud of the knocker. An instant later there was the shuffling of feet in the hall, and the sharp closing of a door.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.

But watch him as the shades of evening fall, and you see the cat as he really is.

Winslow was always more or less excited by a customer.

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees.

He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal’klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump.

For when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

And all the straining things within my heart You'll never know.

Sometimes I almost doubt that he ever existed. It is as if the man, and all that pertains to him, were being erased from human record by some mysterious acceleration of the common process of obliteration.

“A picture with sound and color, reproducing faithfully the ordinary life about us, its tints and voices, even the noises of the city—or traffic passing in the street and newsboys crying the scores of the afternoon games—vividly and naturally.”

“So you bite, you damned brute?” Otchumyelov hears suddenly. “Lads, don’t let him go! Biting is prohibited nowadays! Hold him! ah . . . ah!”

Not the great nor well bespoke; But the mere uncounted folk.

Now, these rays were so bright, and they seemed to make such a shining way from earth to heaven, that when the child went to his solitary bed, he dreamed about the star; and dreamed that, lying where he was, he saw a train of people taken up that sparkling road by angels.

I am always remembering. Come and remember with me!

A dream of the sea in her eyes—And the kiss of the sea in her hair.

“No one shall be my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits.”

For the drought will go on drying while there’s anything to dry — Then it rains until you’d fancy it would bleach the sunny sky.